MERYEM BATAN

MERYEM BATAN

“dunya”

2014

4:11

For this project, I reflected the sounds I hear in my everyday life. I chose some phrases that are ignorantly being used from other people and myself. I thought it can be offensive to use others voice; so, I used my own voice to represent these phrases. This also helped me to create an empathy with them and see the world from their eyes. As a Muslim, I compared what I hear, and what my brothers and sisters hear at the other side of the world in their everyday life.

This idea started to develop when I started to grow, and understand and see the real situation of the world. However, I wanted to focus more on to the Muslim people for this project, and reflect the hard times they are having. I also wanted to reflect the comfort that I feel and got used to as a person who was born, and live in the U.S.A. This comfort sometimes makes me think that everyone is having a fine life like I am having. However, with enough research you can see that life is not that simple; therefore, I also used and combined some sounds that I found in my researches, and created a contrast between these two different types of everyday sounds and lives.

When I was close to the end of the project, I felt so sad about the Muslim people’s situations, so I included few sentences to the end, which is related about our belief system. The sentences are “THEY WANT THIS DUNYA” and “WE WANT THE AKHIRAH”, which the term of ‘dunya’ means ‘the lower’ and refers to ‘this world’, and the term of ‘akhirah’ refers to ‘after life’ in Islam. And if anyone else makes someone suffer intentionally, s/he will payoff in the Akhirah, and will be punished for what s/he have done.